Compound loss,complex grief: Social work during a pandemic

In the profession of social work grief can be pathologized, medicalized, and manualized. Such is the case with diagnostic manuals such ICD11’s “Prolonged Grief Disorder” and DSM 5’s “Persistent Complex Bereavement Disorder.” However, what should be the response and the practice when the world is under assault by a virus? Particularly since the illness, death, and disruption this virus has caused are the rightful subjects of sadness and suffering? Not to mention the fact that the consequences of those hardships have been continuously felt for nearly one full year.

The pandemic has caused many different forms, and many layers of loss from personal to professional. They include the obvious and direct ones like the death and illness of loved ones to the less readily evident, such as the loss of traditional classroom spaces or the loss of the sense of community. The layers include the inability to grieve according to custom, to participate in rituals, travel, hug or touch, as well as being robbed of graduations, birthdays, and wedding, or just meeting mates at a pub or sporting event.

The authors in this section take up the issue of documenting the compound losses and complex nature of grief, mourning, and bereavement and how social workers creatively negotiate it, personally and professionally. Complex grief requires an array of responses. Although all the essays in this section are written from a western geographical position, they offer different cultural perspectives on the phenomenon of grief. They describe wrestling with personal grief, collective grief, and disenfranchised grief. By relating to the larger aspects of the person in its environment, like culture, religion and spirituality, social workers are well equipped for working with grief. Social workers can help convert personal grief into hope and transform collective grief into advocacy.

Experiencing grief during a pandemic can cause loss of motivation, concentration, or inability to see clearly, and can create a sense of failure to live up to one’s normal standards. Social distancing measures present severe challenges for grieving processes which rely on being touched or being in community, compounding the loss. Loss of community was also experienced when universities switched to remote teaching and both instructors and students were deprived the sense of comradery which comes from physically meeting in a classroom (Dove, 2021). All this has necessitated that social workers come up with creative alternatives using technology and advocating for individual rights because they are not able to sit side by side or reach out a comforting hand (Fox et al., 2021). At the same time, these alternatives have also opened up processes of hope, sense-making and creative opportunities (McGovern, 2021).

Of course, social workers are not immune from the same sadness confronting their clients and students. Many are experiencing losses themselves. The distinction between theoretical or conceptual knowledge and the embodied experience of loss is something that the qualitative social workers in this section capture in their reflexive essays. For those who experience the death of family or friends during this period, the pain can be especially acute. Mfoafo-M’Carthy (2021), who lost a mother writes, “I know the five stages of grief almost verbatim: denial and isolation, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance (Kubler-Ross and Kessler, 2014). I also know these feelings do not come in linear timelines. Yet, I found it hard to bear when these stages went topsy-turvy on me. One minute I accept, the next I deny.” Currin-McCulloch (2021), who lost a father, points to living in the liminal state of mourning the loss of a parent simultaneously with losing her clinical practice. For Currin-McCulloch it was an additional challenge not being part of a clinical environment anymore; so personal grief and global pandemic tangled. We are reminded professional training and experience do not fully prepare you for your own adjustments and meaning-finding processes.

Some essays also challenge the notion of individual grief and closure. Instead, they emphasize the collective nature of grief and grieving (Dennis, 2021; Mfoafo-M’Carthy, 2021). For example, cultural and collective responses to communities seeking redress for injustices can be further complicated by labeling them protests, detracting from their core message, and adding to a history of loss for Indigenous people (Dennis, 2021). But collective grief can also be harnessed and transformed into advocacy, as illustrated by efforts to gather reactions from a community of individuals with disabilities to the death of one of its members due to insufficient services. The result was neither shock nor surprise but rather they perceived it as an easily recognized consequence of the pandemic (Dee-Price, 2021).

The losses and these “disenfranchised” griefs interact with each other and can make for difficult situations. The essays in this section offer new insights for social workers for meeting grief as a social and collective experience but with respect and understanding for the person’s individual circumstances. As Fox et al. (2021) observes, “The global grief however is collective, and bereavement continues to be universal. So too is the creative social work response.” (Fox et al., 2021).